Daimler

The town of Coventry in early 1900’s was prominent in the cycle and motor car manufacturing trades and I wrote to the Motor Manufacturing Co. there and was successful in getting the offer of a job at the same salary I was getting in Paisley (~1904). It was an opportunity to get some good experience.

It took a day in the train from Lochwinnoch changing trains at Carlisle and Birmingham. I found it a picturesque old place with narrow, winding streets and beautiful country surrounding it. I was lucky to get the best lodgings I had ever been in. It happened this way. The evening of my arrival I left my bag at a hotel where I had a meal and looked up the local county newspaper to post an ad in the next day’s paper for lodgings. When I showed the man in charge my ad written out he began to copy it down. Then he turned to give me a look. “You are Scottish aren’t you?” he asked. “Well look, I’ve always thought well of Scotchmen.” He smiled in a pleasant way. He evidently liked my appearance. Then he continued, “This is a little out of order but I know some friends who have a vacancy for a young man. I could give you their address..” “That’s just what I’m looking for,” I said. After a short conversation I picked up my bag at the hotel, hired a cab and got the cabby to drive me to the address given.

It was a house in a nice row of brick houses. They had their own door and a little lawn inside the front fence. The house was owned by a Mr. and Mrs. George Elliott. I told the cabby to wait a minute and knocked at the door. A pleasant young woman opened it and my first look was enough. Her kindly, grey eyes told me all I wanted but we had to go through the usual forms, to look at the room she was renting and to hear the cost of the lodgings. “Can I come in tonight?” I asked. “Oh, surely,” she laughed, “My husband and I are just having dinner. You will join us.” I went out to pay the cabby and brought in my bag. I met George Elliott in the dining room in front of a well-filled table with a little girl of three in a high chair beside him. “This is little Katie,” said Mr. Elliott and Katie smiled at me with a wide and happy face. It was a pleasant house with a happy little family and we got along famously. George Elliott had not the culture and the education of his wife but he was a hard worker. He was a foreman in a Coventry factory that employed hundreds of women making ribbons, belts, men’s braces, and other things. Mrs. Elliott’s father had been a sea captain. She and her husband had both come from Cardiff. They treated their lodgers as one of the family and little Katy was soon at home sitting on my knee and chattering about dolls and her toys. She was a bright girl.

The work in the new office was just like what I had been doing. The first job I got was to design a new gearbox for a new type of car. I found the English draughtsmen were not such hard workers as those I had been among. More time was spent chatting to each other, even when the chief was at his desk. When he was out in the shops not much was done at all. I made up my mind that I would keep going harder than I ever had and learn all that I could. There was a Frenchman at the other side of the drawing office and a tall Scotchman named Kerr behind me. I got on well with the Scotchman, of course, but Mr. Frenchman didn’t seem to like my looks. After only a month there I overheard him saying to his neighbour, “Does that damn Scot never lift his head off his paper?” and he would glare at me out of the corner of his eye. Kerr kept me abreast of all that was said and we laughed about Mr. Frenchie’s antics. Kerr used to go uptown with them to an expensive restaurant for lunch and he declared the Frenchie would eat nothing but the most expensive food on the menu.

I made a trip to London in a Motor Manufacturing Co. car that was being taken up to the showrooms there. It was a weekend with Monday a holiday and I was invited to spend the weekend with my cousins, the Dickies at South Kensington. The driver of the car was a Frenchman. There were many French mechanics employed in the motor car industry because France was several years ahead of other countries in the early automotive industry. Just a few miles out of Coventry one of the back wheels seized on the axle. The three passengers got out and helped the mechanic get the wheel off. Luckily, we found a heavy hammer in the mechanic’s tool kit and we banged heartily at the wheel hub to loosen it. In these days most cars had a stationary rear axle and the rear wheels were driven from a countershaft fixed crosswise under the frame by means of a sprocket wheel drive and chains. Two of us held the wheel up on a fence at the side of the road while the mechanic filed out the hub with a half-round file. Then a lot of oil was squirted on the axle, the wheel put on and the sprocket chain fixed. We got up to London in three hours without further trouble. I dropped off somewhere near Regents Park and boarded a bus for my destination. I boasted to my cousins of doing the ninety-mile run from Coventry to London in three hours and they were duly impressed. We passed three cars on the way overtaking one that tried to race us.

The Dickie family had a big house in London but I did not feel at home in so much style. The evening I arrived the youngest daughter, Nettie Dickie, (who was about my age) came down to dinner in full evening dress and looked at me with friendly eyes. She told me she had to go to a dance. She turned around for me to admire her bare arms and shoulders. I was rather tongue-tied but I think she saw from my expression that I admired her. I was still more embarrassed by a silly thing that happened next day. The Dickies had a fat dog that seemed to have the run of the house. As I stepped out of the dining room after lunch I trod on the dog’s mess on the hall carpet with both feet. The smell and the effort I was making to wipe my shoes drew the other’s attention. The servants were rung for, I took my shoes off and the maids were given orders to clean up everything. The maids said nothing but their black looks and a kick the dog got from one of them told its own tale. When I got my shoes cleaned, I was taken to church by Nettie Dickie. It was the first English church service I had ever been at and Nettie saw that I found the right places in the hymn book for I was all at sea. I did not know when to kneel until Nettie gave me a push on the leg which wasn’t so bad when she gave the signal with her own well-clad limb.

I had another weekend in London. This time I went to call on a family whose father, John Anderson, had been a Lochwinnoch man and had worked in my grandfather’s woolen mill. They gave me a fine reception and old John had many questions to ask about Lochwinnoch and of my mother. When he and I were sitting together he told me that my mother was a fine young woman and many young men in Lochwinnoch would have been glad to marry her. I took it that he would have been quite willing himself. I can remember my mother telling of his awful stutter when he was a young man in Lochwinnoch and came to the Crawford house. One of his sons took me all around London on the Sunday. We saw Westminster Abbey and St. Paul’s Cathedral in the forenoon. We then went out to Eton College and Windsor Castle in the afternoon.

While at Coventry I often went on a cycle run. I had my sister send down my bicycle from home. Warwickshire had some beautiful roads and scenery. I went often along the five-mile avenue to Kenilworth Castle and several times I paid a visit to the castle itself whose ruins were open to the public. There was also Warwick Castle at Leamington. This was a little longer ride. These were two of the famous places of old England. I started off one Sunday to ride to Stratford, the town of the great Shakespeare. However, I was only a few miles from Stratford when a heavy rainstorm began. So, I turned back and when I got to Coventry, I was a very wet man. I did not get near enough to shake hands with old Shakespeare.

I learned quite a bit about the newer trends in car design and got on well with the Chief Draughtsman. This paid off in the long run. After only six months work there came a day when the chief was called into the manager’s office, then came out with a worried face pacing the office with his hands in his pockets and doing nothing which was so unusual that it drew our attention. We soon heard what was wrong. The works were closing down. We concluded that they were not financially sound and too much in debt to continue. Three draughtsmen were to stay on for another month and I was one of these. The rest were paid off. Mr. Frenchie did a lot of talking and cursing in his own language but he had to go with the rest. Kerr and I with a younger man stayed on and finished the jobs we were doing. The Chief came to see me after the others had left to say he was sorry I had been such a short time with them but that there was enough work to keep me going for another month. He told me that he had spoken to the Chief Draughtsman of the Daimler Motor Co, next door to us. He said he was sure that he would hire me if I went to see him. I thanked him and when the time came I went to the crowded drawing office of the Daimler plant next door. The Chief Draughtsman said that he had heard of me and to come along when the other job finished.

In another week I was in the Daimler drafting room without a day lost. There was a better class of men in the Daimler drafting room. However, it was a small office for twenty draughtsmen and we had scant room in between our drawing boards. An odd thing happened when I started there. The Chief Draughtsman asked me if I knew anything about marine work. I told him I had been a draughtsman with Caird & Co. Shipbuilders, Greenock. “The very man I want,” said the young chief. “Here is a plan of a motor yacht. We have to put in a Daimler engine and a propeller shaft. Nobody here knows how. So go ahead with it.” Here I was saddled with plans for a motor yacht’s machinery when I thought I was here to learn about motor cars. However, I got rid of the yacht in a month’s time and was glad to get back to gearboxes and back axles again. Then I got into designing a new type of steering gear as well.

The Elliotts and I went out together one day to see the Lady Godiva procession through the Coventry streets. It was a very warm day and by the time Lady Godiva got to where we waited her on white horse the perspiration was oozing through her pink bathing suit. Mrs. Elliott laughed when she sighted her and said Lady Godiva was losing some fat today. Peeping Tom would scarcely know her. Peeping Tom was represented by the upper part of a man’s figure that was stuck in a window of a three-story house on a Coventry main street. The house hadn’t been there in Peeping Tom’s Day but it was supposed to be built on the site from where he spied on the lady.

I remember that summer in Coventry, 1905 I think it was. It was a warm one. There was a nice park with swan ponds not far from Northumberland Street where I lived with the Elliotts. I often strolled out there on Sunday afternoon after the Elliott’s big Sunday dinner and little Katy Elliott was my constant companion. George Elliott usually had garden work to keep him busy and Mrs. E. liked to rest after her extra work preparing the Sunday dinner. Little Katy chattered away to her dolls or to the swans. We usually had some bread to throw to them and it was a peaceful and happy time. Katy kept me busy answering her many questions or swinging her piggy back when her legs got tired running about.

Before leaving Lochwinnoch to go to work in Coventry our Aunt Orr of Kaim told me that I would need to wear a tall hat and swallow-tail coat if I ever went to church with the Englishmen. I had the coat but no tall hat so she presented me with a sovereign to buy a tile hat. I did invest later in a tall black hat that cost a little over the sovereign.  And I wore it once to an English church at Coventry. That was the only time that it was ever used. I could then tell Aunt Orr that it had been worn. I was more interested in the Quakers and went to a few of their services. They were strong in the Midlands and gave me a good reception but I did not need my tile hat there. None of the Quakers seemed to go in for full dress. They were a sensible people.

It took me a little time to understand the local accents of Warwickshire. Their a’s were often pronounced like an i. For instance, I was once looking for an address on Hales Street in the town which a Scotchman would pronounce with a broad a. The man I asked on the street scratched his head. “Hales, I never heard of it. How do you spell it?” I told him and he said, “Oh, Hyles St. Just around the first corner.” Also, an old lady called on the Elliott’s one day. She had a real Cockney tongue. She was telling a story of a ghost she had seen but so many h’s were dropped and an equal number put in at other places I lost the sense of it. It was all about an “airy heye” that the ghost had. Mrs. Elliott gave me a wink when she saw I wasn’t catching the drift of the story.

Speaking of that old tall hat of mine, I brought it to Canada with me. It still survives but is now slightly battered as my daughters have used it with their fancy dress costumes at dances, etc. I can remember Nancy wearing the striped trousers, swallow-tail coat and the hat to some school jamboree but it wasn’t too long before she couldn’t get into the things.

My stay in Coventry was on the whole a pleasant one. My fellow draughtsmen were an intelligent lot and I got on fine with them. A bright lad who worked next to me was a college graduate. He had a bright and inquiring mind. He and I used to walk home a part of the way together. He was fond of an argument on any subject. His principal subject was religion. He was a confirmed atheist and he pronounced all kinds of religions as impractical theories. That Darwin and other scientists had proven them to be altogether false and improbable. I took the opposite view but neither convinced the other of his correctness. I had to agree with a lot he said about churches but tried to explain that true religion was independent of churches and was true and necessary for man’s existence.

Another older draughtsman was connected with some church organization and he invited a few of the unmarried men of the staff to a dance in a private home one evening. I was one of them and I found that the young ladies who were the hostesses were the members of a dancing school and this was their annual dance. We had a great time. The girls were on their best behavior as their dancing instructors were in charge and I had more exercise to the legs that night than I can remember as the men were in the minority. We had to be put through our paces for every dance. I never was much of a dancer but I got pushed and pulled into the figures of the dance very thoroughly that night. I think some of my young partners didn’t think much of my ability.

I had one or two holidays home to Lochwinnoch, returning home on a night train with an excursion ticket. These trips were tiring and very slow. I remember going in a crowded train from Birmingham to Glasgow that took twice as long as the usual trip. We were hung up at Crewe for an hour or two and the carriage of the old- fashioned kind was packed with twelve people instead of the regular ten. It was a mixed crowd. Stout ladies, thin ladies and some men. A young lady squeezed tight against my right side and kept her head always turned to look the other way until that stop at Crewe when she fell asleep. As she fell deeper into her sleep her head gradually fell down my way until she was resting it on my shoulder. Her breath perfumed with peppermint candy was on my neck. It was a little embarrassing at first until I thought I would lean my head on top of hers. Luckily the light was dim and we sat in that restful position for most of that stop at Crewe. When the train jerked to a start again the young lady woke with a shock and gave me a glare as she straightened out. She was not as shocked as I had expected and we chatted at length when we weren’t nodding. It was a relief to both of us when we arrived in Glasgow in the early morning. Some of the ladies sitting opposite had brought bottles of lemonade to drink with their sandwiches. Perhaps due to the motion of the train it did not agree with them and one after the other they expelled the liquid out the window. All done with groans and exclamations about the poisonous stuff people sold nowadays.

I was not more than a week or two back at work from one of these long weekend trips home when I got a letter from the Arrol-Johnstone Car Co. It informed me that a vacancy was being held in their office for a draughtsman and they would be glad if I would come back to them. It appeared that a new Chief Draughtsman named Cameron had been appointed (it was he who wrote the letter) and Mr. Napier had asked him to try and get me back. They offered a salary of 2 pounds, 15 shillings a week which was a lot more than the Daimler people were paying. I told them in reply that if they would raise the offer to 3 pounds / week I might consider it. Back came a letter agreeing to that and with the information that I would be the leading draughtsman in their office under the chief. I would have charge of the plans for a new Arrol-Johnstone car that was being designed for the next Tourist Trophy Race. I showed the letter to the Chief Draughtsman in the Daimler office and asked him if they would come up with the same salary I might stay on. “No,” he said, “I’ll be sorry to lose you, Hepburn but that’s about all the salary I get as Chief. So they wouldn’t come up with that much. I am sure.” So, after just about a year with the Daimler people I decided to go back to my old drawing board at Paisley. I had learned a lot and could make a better showing than I had done before.